# Brave Search API + MCP vs Valyu

> Brave Search API + MCP has a score of 68.1 (B) against Valyu's 64.6 (B). Both do web search. The largest gap is payments & pricing, 25 points. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

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- Site index for agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt (full text: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms-full.txt)
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- Updated: 2026-10-04

Brave Search API + MCP has a score of 68.1 (B) against Valyu's 64.6 (B). Both do web search. The largest gap is payments & pricing, 25 points.

- Brave Search API + MCP: grade B, 68.1/100, rank #132 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/brave-search-mcp.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/brave-search-mcp.json
- Valyu: grade B, 64.6/100, rank #179 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/valyu.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/valyu.json

## Which one, for what

Pick Brave Search API + MCP for security & auth (+14), payments & pricing (+25), maintenance & community (+7).

Pick Valyu for schema & documentation (+15), agent ergonomics (+6).

## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Brave Search API + MCP | Valyu | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 55 | 53 | Brave Search API + MCP +2 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 72 | 87 | Valyu +15 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 72 | 78 | Valyu +6 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 58 | 44 | Brave Search API + MCP +14 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 70 | 45 | Brave Search API + MCP +25 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 87 | 80 | Brave Search API + MCP +7 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 82 | 79 | Brave Search API + MCP +3 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **68.1 · B** | **64.6 · B** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Brave Search API + MCP | Valyu |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Brave | Valyu |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.search.brave.com/res/v1/web/search` | `https://api.valyu.ai/v1/search` |
| Transports | stdio, Streamable HTTP, HTTP | HTTP, Streamable HTTP |
| Auth | OAuth or key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Pay per use | Freemium |
| x402 | payer tooling only | no |
| Licence | MIT | none |
| Tools exposed | 8 | 6 |
| Context cost (tools/list) | n/a | n/a |
| p95 latency | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Availability (30d) | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| MCP registry | `io.github.brave/brave-search-mcp-server` | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-12 |
| Popularity | 1.4k stars, 22k npm/wk | 19 stars, 6.7k npm/wk, 7.1k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 3.5/5 (2) | 4.5/5 (2) |

## Verdicts

**Brave Search API + MCP.** x402 proxy sells web, LLM Context, news, video, image and local search at $0.005 a call, and a failed search isn't charged. The status page marks the Search API "not monitored" and shows no incident history.

**Valyu.** Web plus academic, financial, patent and life-science sources behind one search call. No published rate limits and no Retry-After or backoff guidance.

## Before you call either

### Brave Search API + MCP

1. Call /res/v1/llm/context when you need page text rather than links. It saves a separate fetch
2. Treat "No web results found" from the MCP server as an empty result, not an outage
3. On 429, wait for `X-RateLimit-Reset` seconds. There's no `Retry-After` header
4. Skip `brave_summarizer`. The Summarizer is deprecated and the x402 proxy doesn't sell it
5. Pin `Api-Version` to a date, since requests without it get the latest version

### Valyu

1. Set `max_price` and `max_num_results` on every search to bound cost
2. Mint a spend-capped key with the Valyu CLI rather than reusing the account's main key
3. Call `valyu_search`. The legacy per-vertical MCP tools stop working on 2026-12-01
4. A 206 means some sources failed. Check which before treating results as complete
5. DeepResearch is async. Poll `valyu_deepresearch_status` rather than waiting in one call

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